Jersey City officials are trying jump-start plans to build a new entrance to Liberty State Park by extending a dead-end portion of Jersey Avenue.

A goal of city planners for years, extending the rood through a heavily polluted marsh and opening a new main entrance to the park, won't he cheap, or easy. But officials hope the state will ease up on requirements that made the project too expensive in the past.

Extending Jersey Avenue woald provide residents of Jersey City - especially Downtown and Lafayette - with a much-neaded passage from their neighborhood into the state's moast popular park, officials say.

"Access to Liberty State Park currently discriminates against Jersey City residents," according to a report by a city contracted engineering firm. The city last week awarded a $279,100 contract to engineering firm Dames & Moore of Pearl River, New York, to perform studies the city will need when it applies for permits to fill in a portion of Mill Creek in order to build the road over it

"I want a situation where you feel comfortable about seeing your 11-year-old daughter get on her bike and go off (to the park)," said Cheryl Allen-Munley director of the Department of Engineering's Bureau of Hydraulics and Transportation.

At its southern end, Jersey Avenue is little more than a dusty, pock-marked truck route, used mainly by scrap dealers an Aetna Street, which runs along the edge of the creek and the Morris Canal basin.

A wooden footbridge over the creek provides access to the park for walkers, joggers and bicyclists.

But the bridge and path leading to it are hardly a welcoming entrance: It's dark at night, passes through an industrial area with high weeds and crosses a muddy bog often reeking from raw sewage.

Planners hope to fill in a portion of the creek, extend the road over it and connect it with Audrey Zapp Drive near the Liberty Science Center,

The city had discussed the Jersey Avenue extension with the state Department of Environmental Protection in the past, Allen-Munley said, but plans that were proposed proved too expensive.

One of the main problems is a sewer outflow pipe thnt empties into the creek.

In past discussions, the DEP had wanted the city to extend the sewer outflow to deeper water in the Hudson River before it would approve the filling in the creek, considered wetlands, a project that woald be too expensive, Allen-Munley said.

Now, the city is hoping the DEP will agree to letting them build a bulkhead from which the pipe will flow with a device to prevent solid waste from flowing into the creek.

'The DEP was looking at these things differently," Allen-Munley said.

While some residents have expressed concern that the project would open Jersey Avenue to traffic flowing off the New Jersey Turnpike, Allen-Munley said planners will take measures to make sure the extension does not create a "stealth highway."

"We are trying our best to prevent this from becoming a truck route," Allen-Munley said. "People should have a way to get in, and to events in the park.